Chapter 57
Nothing like the Threat of Decapitation to Make the Day More Interesting.

So today I walked around all paranoid at work. I was trying to pay attention to the fact of whether or not I’m “attracting” people. I talked to Sweet Pea last night about my “problem”. I asked her why this stuff happens to me, basically she says that I am “myself” around guys who I don’t see as a “threat”. I wonder how many words I can enclose in quotation marks. It makes sense and I told Sweet Pea that it felt good to be talking to someone who knows me better than I know myself.
I screwed up. Puppy Love came in to the store. I hadn’t e-mailed him back yet and I had this whole thing planned, just like Sweet Pea told me, tell him I’m flattered but tell him that I don’t feel the same way and I hope we can still be friends. But he threw me off. He came into the store this morning and I thought he was working that night and well, everything was out of space and time. He came through my line and there was a customer behind him and I was just finishing up a customer and there wasn’t enough time and it wasn’t the right place to even bring it up. So I talked about his cereal that he was buying and because of my nervousness I didn’t maintain eye contact very well and he ended up walking away without his receipt and I felt like crap. The whole day I kept trying to think of what I should do. When I got off of work I went and e-mailed him, but I didn’t feel like I should e-mail that I didn’t feel the same way (don’t worry I’m not a complete moron I didn’t e-mail that I felt the same either). But instead I e-mailed him telling him that I thought he was going to be coming into work that night (which it turns out that I had looked at the wrong day on the schedule). I also asked when he would be working again, that’s it. That’s all I wrote. Something tells me that it wasn’t the best way to handle the situation but I don’t know what the hell I am suppose to do. In an ideal world he would have been working, I would have talked to him in person about this. Actually, in an ideal world this would have never happened to me because I would be somewhere else in my life right now instead of 23 years old and working at a grocery store with a bunch of teenagers.
In other news, I gave myself bangs last night. Don’t worry; it wasn’t due to emotional instability this time, this was due to pure boredom. Along with the bangs I cut off about an inch. I think I like having my hair a shorter length, it looks cuter and I feel lighter and happier. Well.
Right now I am a bit peeved at a roommate. Awkward huh? I didn’t think that it would get to this point, and so quickly too, but it has arrived. All she does is talk tell the same stories over and over again and talk about this one guy who she says she doesn’t like but he sure is the preoccupation of her conversations. Then today I called her because some people were going to go play ultimate Frisbee and I got the voicemail and I asked her to call me back telling me where they would be playing and what time. She never called back. So I spent the evening with my parents which isn’t really that odd and I came home and no one was home. My roommates always bitch about how I don’t hang out with them and when I make the effort there is no reciprocation. Do they complain because it helps them to feel better? To feel like they actually want to include me in things but in all reality I am to them only competition with boys. I wish there was a non-threatening way to just bring it out in the open that I am not competition for them, at least not with the boys around here. I mean seriously, how many 17 year olds are they trying to snag? Apparently that’s the only area of boy world they have to worry about with me. I am never going to end up dating one of “their guys”, aside from the fact that I think their guy friends are completely immature and I haven’t met one yet that I would even find capable of interesting banter but you couple this with the fact that guys (who are in my bell curve…you know, older than 21, single, tall, etc.) are not interested in me. I live in buddy land. I’m actually running for office, “Vote Me for President”. And it’s true that my roommates seem to be holding green cards in buddy land, but the difference between them and me is the fact that I am not under some false impression that there is a way out, and that one of these weaklings is going to be able to fix me. I guess I’m just upset because sometimes I feel like all girls are the same, I mean, they may pretend to be better than your average girl, but underneath girls are jealous conniving creatures. Have I not already said this? I think I have said this all before. I just didn’t ever say it from the perspective of a girl who feels intentionally left out. The person I should really be upset with is me, and I’ll admit that I am a bit. It’s my “anxiety” that keeps me from just going out into the other room (oh did I mention my roommates came home while I was writing this and they brought some boys over) and just saying ‘hi’ or something. I guess I am well conditioned, and I just don’t want to interfere with whatever lame flirting thing they’ve got going on.
Last night for instance, I came home and one of my roommates was upstairs with her ex-boyfriend. What the hell are people thinking about when they decide to hang out with an ex? It’s a lonely road to disaster; you’ll just end up liking the guy again or worse, more than you did before because he’s such a sweetheart of an ex-boyfriend to you. Anyway, I didn’t even go upstairs at first, he called out another roommate’s name when I walked in the front door and I just told them it wasn’t her, so he was asking my roommate who it was. Then all the questions started because this is one of the bright paramecium brains they are worried about me stealing away. I hear my last name and I assumed it’s because I know this guy that is upstairs so I go upstairs to see who it is. I don’t know him. He asks me why he hasn’t met me and I kind of feel like Cady Heron in Mean Girls when Regina George says, “wait, why don’t I know you?” I almost responded that I had been home schooled but the movie quote would have been wasted on him. I answer a few questions, my roommate tells him that I just graduated and he says, “from high school?” and then the missing pieces of the puzzle start to come together…’oh,’ I think to myself, ‘I look like a high-schooler, this explains most all of my problems now.’ I told him college, I just graduated from college. I engage in some conversation with another roommate and then I decided that I want to go back downstairs and call Sweet Pea. OH! But the whole point of that story was how my roommate reacted to my innocent interaction with her ex-boo. She seemed a little uneasy, and you know how sometimes you can sense that when other girls are getting uneasy that you are even breathing. That was when I decided that hiding out in my room was better than looking like I was trying to have an interesting conversation with a roommates ex-territory, girl rule number 37, “don’t engage in any form of conversation with another girl’s ex-boyfriend, whether she is family, friend, foe, acquaintance, if you know the girl, don’t talk to the ex”…I’m so stupid.
I wish I weren’t the unpopular roommate.